The more things change, the more things stay the same.

I was tweaking my Nitrous.IO box when it occurred to me that cloud computing is bringing the command line back into primacy. I know you can get a MS Windows box in the cloud. And I know that many apps come with a decent http admin portal. But there are a lot of people talking to Linux boxes via ssh. The command line and I go way back, so Nitrous.IO felt right at home.

Almost like home. I’m a long time zsh user, so I was happy to see that Nitrous.IO included zsh 5.0.5 in their autoparts package manager. Unfortunately, command completion was not working. A quick fix was easy enough (upload the required files and add to fpath) but seemed a bit selfish. Autoparts is open source, so I took a closer look.

The zsh.rb package definition looked ok. I played around with things just to make sure. No joy. Then I realized that either Nitrous.IO was providing seriously fast boxes or zsh was not being built from source. A little more poking around and I found an autoparts option to install from source:

parts install zsh --source

And voilà. Completion was working.